Joe Bennett: New Zealand Govt’s aim to make the country smokefree by 2025

The number of tobacco smokers has roughly halved, which means that about one New Zealander in six still smokes. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

Successive New Zealand governments have conducted a crusade against smoking. The stated aim has been to make New Zealand ‘smokefree’ by 2025.

They banned tobacco advertising and sponsorship. They banned smoking in indoor public places. They banned smoking in numerous outdoor public places as well. And they hiked the tax on tobacco every year by a lot, in addition to any increase in price. A packet of cigarettes that cost about $3 when this process started now costs about $30.

The results of these actions are as follows. The number of tobacco smokers has roughly halved, which means that about one New Zealander in six still smokes. Those people, 15 per cent or more of the population, have become pariahs. You can see them huddled outside in the cold, alienated, judged, pitied and patronised. No political party speaks up for them and they have become so intimidated by the barrage of anti-smoking propaganda that they barely dare to speak up for themselves.

Most of them belong to the working class. They were brought up with smoking and they find it hard to stop. But the cost of their habit now makes it even harder for them to make ends meet. So the poor have been made poorer.

At the same time, a black market in cigarettes has developed, a lot of which is supplied by theft. Tobacco retailers, traditionally the small dairies, live in terror of being held up. Cars around the country are stolen every night to be driven through shop windows. Many retailers have had to barricade premises at their own expense.

And vaping has arisen. Ostensibly the safe alternative to smoking, it has done a splendid job of hooking teenagers to nicotine just as smoking used to do. Who knows what the long-term consequences to their health will be?

In sum, then, a government policy has further impoverished some citizens, made pariahs of one person in six, created a black market, fostered a crime wave, put small business owners in fear for their lives, and brought into existence a new addictive habit for the young.

John Stuart Mill, prince of liberal thinkers, said that the only acceptable reason to exercise power over the freedom of any citizen was to prevent harm to others. And that purpose was achieved when laws were enacted to ban smoking from pubs, restaurants, planes, workplaces and so on some 20 years ago. No one was obliged any longer to inhale second-hand smoke. So why did the authorities not stop there?

They could not argue that the smoker was a burden on the state. Quite the opposite is true. Smokers pay billions in tax over and above the taxes that everyone pays. If they require medical attention as a result of their habit, they have paid for it five times over. Also, by generally dying younger, they leave billions behind in unclaimed pensions. The smoker, in short, is a public benefactor. Why can the authorities not leave them alone?

One reason is that it’s a vanity project. How wonderful to boast that New Zealand will be the first place in the world to eradicate smoking. What a virtuous little nation we are. Who cares what grief we may have caused along the way?

Another reason is the unspoken assumption that longevity is a virtue. But it isn’t. Millions of people in the rich west now outlive their faculties. There’s an epidemic of senile dementia, wardsful of people all hidden away, people still breathing and eating but quite incapable of understanding this newspaper article. And as a result of governmental do-goodery, many former smokers are now doomed to join them.

But the main reason is to be found in a short story by Saki. In it, the deeply unpleasant Mrs de Ropp acts as guardian to an orphaned child called Conradin. He is a frail child and Mrs de Ropp is fo ever stopping him from doing things on the grounds that he might make himself ill.

“Mrs de Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him ‘for his good’ was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome.”

There, in one sentence, is the authorities’ position. Thwarting the smoker ‘for his good’ is a delicious pleasure for anyone in power. The assumption behind it is that the authorities know what’s good for them better than they know themselves. Which is how we treat children, but not autonomous adults.

The crusades of the Middle Ages were ill-conceived, unjustified, cruel and disastrous. Plus ça change.